


fighting with myself

by owilde



Category: The Walking Dead (Telltale Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Background Relationships, Character Study, Depression, F/F, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 07:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16058786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owilde/pseuds/owilde
Summary: Living in a post-apocalyptic world was already hard enough as it were. Did Violet's mind really have to make survival more difficult by tenfold?





	fighting with myself

**Author's Note:**

> coping through fanfic once again? nobody's shocked. depression's a bitch. excuse any hiccups, wrote this on my phone. really though, how fucking difficult would it be to be mentally ill in a post-apocalyptic world?
> 
> title from LP's song by the same name
> 
> TW: for general mental health related things and self-destructive thoughts (well, ish. i didn't want to trigger myself)

Violet missed a lot of things, from before. She missed the obvious things, the things they all yearned for – things like hot showers, good food, the luxury of television. She missed reading; Violet thought she might've even taken to reading the shitty prescribed material from English class if it meant having anything to hold on to. Distractions were far and few in between in their world, now.

It was easy to lose yourself to survival. To live from one day to another, balancing everything on a delicate tightrope where each wrong move was a push closer towards tumbling down. Survival was easy. Survival was strategy, it was numbers. How many days until winter and the first frostbitten resources? How many rations were there left? How many weapons, how many mouths to feed, how many helping hands?

Violet was good at surviving. It was the living that was difficult.

She missed a lot of things. But most of all she missed having someone to talk to, having something to help her, having a structure around her. Life hadn't been a rose-tinted daydream before, but it sure as shit hadn't been _this_ , either.

Violet sat on the steps of the boarding school, staring into the woods. It was turning cold, but she barely noticed, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows to expose her skin to the gently blowing wind. She was fairly sure everyone else was asleep – the school and the grounds were all ringing in silence around her.

Violet missed music, too. Actual music, music to drown herself in, not what they could scrape together with a slightly off key piano and a few decent singers. Though right now, she would've even taken that. But instead, she was forced into hearing her own thoughts, loud and piercing, persistent.

It had never really gotten easier, trying to block out the thoughts that tried to slither their way to the surface of her mind and make her act on them. The thoughts that were a nasty manifestation of the heavy weight in her chest, the flatness, the overwhelming feeling of there being something _wrong_. Sometimes, she was able to tell herself to shut the fuck up, get a grip. But mostly not.

It was difficult to remember how to care, sometimes. About herself, and other people, too. The rational part of her brain knew she loved her friends, loved Clementine – but the rational part had been forcefully silenced, leaving her to wonder just what the fuck was the point in anything.

The door behind her creaked suddenly. Violet didn't turn her head, and a few seconds later, Clementine was sitting beside her. She'd discarded her hat, and she was wearing Violet's sweater. Usually, it made Violet's heart flip. Tonight, it didn't.

"It's late," Clementine said conversationally. "And kind of cold."

Violet stared ahead, her eyes fixed blurrily on a single tree. "Yup."

Clementine was silent for a while. Violet didn't know if she understood. She thought maybe she did. She thought maybe she got the pale scars, the flinching away from certain places and words, the suffocating need to be quiet and not make a scene when all she wanted to do was scream from the top of her lungs and collapse down, and stay there until moss covered her like a rock and the world moved on.

"Wanna talk about it?" Clementine asked. She wasn't making an attempt to touch or get closer. A small part of Violet's mind felt a wave of gratitude wash over her.

"I don't know that there's really anything to tell," she said. "It's the same old shit."

"And how bad is it?" Clementine was keeping her tone light, but Violet heard the worry underneath the surface. She'd heard it a lot, in her life.

"Alright," she said, and blinked her eyes away from the tree. She looked down on the ground, felt her mind screaming quietly again, urging her on, telling her lies she was used to buying. "I'm not... I won't do anything."

"That's not what I meant."

Violet pursed her lips. _Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone–_

"I'm just worried," Clementine continued. "Louis asked me to come talk to you. Said you'd been off today while you two were out."

Violet remembered the ever-present temptation to give up and let the walkers take her, turn her into a thoughtless being. She wouldn't have to even do anything, really. Just stop. One missed stab, one wrongly placed foot. Easy. Not painless, no, but she didn't need it to be.

"Yeah," she said aloud. "I guess. It's fine. I'll get over it."

"Right," Clementine said, not sounding convinced, but Violet hadn't even sounded very convincing to her own ears, either. "Talk to me, alright? Or anyone. What's going on in your head?"

It was a loaded question, one Violet wasn't sure she wanted to answer. She swallowed air, digging her nails into the skin of her palms. "Nothing," she said. "Everything. I don't know, it doesn't fucking _matter_ , I'll be fine."

Another moment of silence that stretched on. Violet wanted to walk into the woods, and keep walking until she couldn't recognize where she was anymore. She wanted to vanish into unfamiliarity.

"Please come inside?" Clementine asked, eventually. "You'll freeze out here."

Violet glanced at her arm, where her skin was prickled from the cold. "Okay," she agreed. "Yeah, fine."

She wouldn't sleep, she knew. But she could try. That was what her life was boiling down to – trying and trying and trying, failing over and over but always getting up again. For now, she could still do it. For now, she was still a survivor. But she didn't know how long it would take before she herself was a greater danger to herself than the rest of the world was.


End file.
